[Illustration: LISTENING FOR THE HOUNDS]
We passed little depressions that ran down into ravines, and these,
Haught informed me, were the heads of canyons that sloped away from
the rim, deepening and widening for miles. The rim of the mesa was
its highest point, except here and there a few elevations like Black
Butte. Geologically this mesa was an enormous fault, like the north
rim of the Grand Canyon. During the formation of the earth, or the
hardening of the crust, there had been a crack or slip, so that one
edge of the crust stood up sheer above the other. We passed the heads
of Leonard Canyon, Gentry, and Turkey Canyons, and at last, near
time of sunset, headed down into beautifully colored, pine-sloped,
aspen-thicketed Beaver Dam Canyon.
A mile from the rim we were deep in the canyon, walled in by
rock-strewn and pine-timbered slopes too steep for a horse to climb.
There was a little gully on the black soil where there were no
evidences of recent water. Haught said he had never seen Beaver Dam
Creek dry until this season. We traveled on until we came to a wide,
open space, where three forks of this canyon met, and where in the
middle of this glade there rose a lengthy wooded bench, shaded and
beautified by stately pines and silver spruce. At this point water
appeared in the creek bed, flowing in tiny stream that soon gathered
volume.
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